Good Day,

I'm developing faceplates for WinCC Unified in TIA Portal V17.

Within the Faceplate, I see there is a "Global Definition Area". I am hoping to define variables here that can be used by multiple other scripts within my faceplate - in the same way that "Tags" can be defined and used in the normal WinCC Comfort Panels. This would save me time redefining several variables over and over.

However I have no idea what is the correct syntax to reference any of the globally defined variables. For example if I define a global variable "Status", then I would like to access this variable over several different scripts to dynamize objects depending on the value of Status.

The JS compiler is completely useless as it never shows errors for incorrect references or even functions.

Please Assist. 

Hi,

I asked siemens something similair and got the answer. 

You cannot import global modules into faceplate so you cannot use functions inside of faceplate. 

I'm dealing with the same problem right now and i'm currently searching for a solution. One Idea I have is to link a tag to faceplate interface, which will trigger a Script, running in "Scheduled tasks". I can't seem to get that running tho. Reading the forum it could be due to Parallel execution of Scheduled tasks.

So Another Idea is to link a HMI_tag from faceplate interface to some invisible IO-Field, that will trigger desired functions. I didn't test that out yet.

If you find any other solution I will be happy to hear them.

Haha it seems we are all apart of the WinCC Unified Beta test.

I have not found an easy solution yet. Essentially within my faceplate I have several different animations which depend on the same "Status" variable. It is originally in a "Word" data type so I was hoping I could have a global definition where I "bit-strip" it.

I've resorted to bit-stripping the same status variable over and over again each time I need to use it in my faceplate.

Hi eMTe

Thank you for your response. I've run a few tests based on this and these are my findings:

• The Global Definition Area within a Faceplate can be used to define/initialize variables and user defined functions ONLY
• Even a simple Tags("tagname").Read() function will not run from here - which is why this didn't work for me initially

With this knowledge this is what worked for me:

1. Initialize several bool variables in the global definition area to False
2. Define a "Bitstrip" function with 1 parameter and change the value of the bool variables based on the parameter.
3. On any random property in my faceplate use a script to perform the Tags("Status").Read() and call the "Bitstrip" function - passing the read status as a parameter. This then updates the value of my bool variables every time there is a data change to status.
4. Use the global bool variables in scripts to animate various parts of my faceplate

Row113

• Even a simple Tags("tagname").Read() function will not run from here - which is why this didn't work for me initially

As a sidenote!

If you link a tag (UDT) to the faceplate interface you can call it in the script. For example: Interface 'MyUDT1' is the tag-link to a library UDT with two DWORDS being STAT and CMD.

In the script you can call the tags with the name you gave them in the faceplate interface:

 let MyStatus = Tags('MyUDT1.STAT').Read();   

 The above will load the value off the tag in the script variable

That Said: Not being able to use global scripts and read or write global tags from faceplates is very limiting.